After earning her Pomona degree in Latin American Studies, Maria Luz
Garcia '01 set off for Guatemala, where she wound up working with
survivors of that nation's long civil war. Today, even while pursuing
her doctoral degree, Garcia carries on her efforts in a small Guatemalan
village, and her dedication led the Pomona College Alumni Association to
honor her with the 2007 Inspirational Young Alumni Award.

The student selection committee determined that Garcia's work best
exemplifies the quote on the College's Blaisdell Gates: "They only are
loyal to this college who departing, bear their added riches in trust
for mankind."

Garcia wrote her senior thesis about the Recovery of the Historical
Memory Project (REHMI), the Catholic Church's account of civilian
persecution during the 36-year-long Guatemalan Civil War, which ended in
1996. The report implicated the military in 90 percent of the Mayan
civilian deaths.

Upon graduation, Garcia set off for Guatemala, ending up in the
highlands village of Nebaj, where a group of Mayan women-mostly refugees
who had escaped to the mountains during the civil war-had founded a
small cooperative to sell their weavings. When she arrived, the women
had just received a $2,000 grant to develop an agricultural project, and
with Garcia's help, the women rented a plot of land, built a greenhouse
and grew vegetables to sell at the local market. Garcia worked side by
side with the women-many of whom had lost parents, husbands, siblings
and children to the military persecution of the Mayans-and they began to
share their life stories. Eventually, as she began to learn their
language, she started recording their history.

"What they really want is for people to hear their histories, to know what
happened to them in the past ... and to know that the legacy of violence
and poverty is something they're still dealing with today," says Garcia.

Garcia started a literacy project which has expanded to include other
family and community members, received grants and assistance from other
American linguistics professors (including her mother, Jule Gomez de
Garcia '72) to document and preserve the language, and made numerous
professional presentations which have earned her the respect of peers
many years her senior.

In 2003, Garcia was awarded a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
for Minorities, and she is pursuing a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology
at the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout her graduate studies,
Garcia has returned to Nebaj repeatedly and continues to work to record
the stories of the survivors and document their struggles and
achievements. One of her goals, she says, is "to make the researcher
obsolete as the women learn to do the work of documenting their language
and their lives themselves."